I think that after reading many posts and playing around with lilo that I have an idea what may be causing some people to have problems with lilo installation. As cwwilson pointed out, one reason is BIOS MBR protection stopping lilo (or anything else) from modifying the MBR.

Another reason is that there is a bug in lilo in search order for disk devices. For example, if I plug in a USB drive I get errors from lilo when I try to install to the MBR of /dev/hda.

I think many of these errors go unrecognized because people are running lilo from config scripts and don't see lilo output.


What I have never heard of is lilo corrupting an MBR. Although updating the MBR properly is extremely critical, it isn't that complicated compared to a lot of other software people have written, and I think lilo works pretty well.

The fact that you have two drives raises a question with lilo because of the bug I noted earlier.

Show us the output from fdisk -l and give us your lilo.conf and it should be simple to get things straightened out.

Thanks for the response!

The fdisk -l command gives me this:

And my lilo reads like this
i tried to not post a lot of the commented areas. if these are needed let me know and i will post this again!

Thanks for the help!

Mmm I think that lilo wasn't properly installed. If you read lilo's man page, you can know about what the letter L and the number 01 means.
Try reinstalling lilo, boot from CD as stated some posts above, and use -v switch to receive more details of lilo when it's installing: lilo -v -v -v

<Sorry clicked twice>

Hey man, I have some questions here because it looks like you have three systems you are trying to boot, and I think we only talked about two. According to your fdisk -l you have 2 NTFS partitions and one linux, is this what you wanted? Your lilo.conf is set up to boot the windows on the /dev/hdc drive but it looks like you will have another windows (which with this config, anyway) you don't wanna boot on hdd in the middle of the drive. Why are the partitions so whacked out? Things should be in order, and contiguous. I think some additional fdisking is in order to clean up this mess...

Also, note that lilo freaks out because you have two drives. I've noticed this before. Fdisk is also giving a wierd message about partitions being out of order, but it lists two partitions that aren't even on the same drive!

There is a typo: "tabel" should be "table" in your windows entry. I think the intervening comments should be fine, but let's not take any chances. How about this:

If I missed something and the 2nd NTFS partition is just to share between Win and linux then don't configure it in lilo.conf. If you want to boot it, change it to bootable with fdisk because Windows won't boot from a partition not mounted bootable according to other posts.

You should get on the linux system (if you can boot it, otherwise bring up a liveCD with linux and chroot into your linux or at least have the kernel mounted where lilo can find it from your lilo.conf. Then (as root) do

lilo -v -t -b /dev/hdc

And read the output carefully. If it looks like what you want, do

lilo -v -b /dev/hdc

Sorry about the late reply, I was out.

Good luck and don't toast anything!

I screwed up when typing some of this out... totally my fault.

the partitions are something like this.

I do agree with you though, this does look a little tweaked... I have windows(which was installed first) on /dev/hdc1 then i have an ntfs partition, mainly just storage space on /dev/hdd2

is partition magic known for writing bad partition tables like this? (thats what i used to partition the disks)

Thanks for the response...
Would it just be easier to install linux on another partition on /dev/hdc1?
as stated in the fdisk table above, this partion is an ntfs partition. can i create a partition after that and install slack on it? then install lilo on the MBR?

Try not to type stuff in- grab it with cut and paste and copy it into the browser so we know what's going on.

According to the latest info which is:

Check me on these facts:

1) You have a bootable Win on /dev/hdc (and it's consuming the whole 40G)
2) You have a linux partition on /dev/hdd
3) You have a non-bootable NTFS partition (for sharing) on /dev/hdd

If I understand correctly, then:

1) Consider whether you really want a 40G Windows. If you do, fine, if not, you have room for a couple of healthy-sized linux or *bsd systems on the same drive. To find out how much Windows space you need, defrag (repeatedly) until all the free space is at the end, and you'll be able to see how much you actually need.
2) You have considerable wasted space (15 cylinders) on /dev/hdd; as we noted earlier this should be cleaned up.
3) This is a very nice drive and you can put tons of linux distros on here. But, remember that if you want to install *bsd (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) you need to install them in primary partitions (and you only get 4 of those) so plan accordingly.

I think you really have to decide what you want to do. Right now it seems like it's difficult to know what to do because you haven't decided what to do. You can't plan disk utilization until you have some idea of what you want to accomplish.

I think the best things to do are:

1) Decide if you want to keep Windows or not.
2) If you want Windows, decide how much space you want for it, then resize the NTFS partition with qtparted.
3) Decide if you want to run *BSD or not. This has to be an early consideration because of the primary partition requirement of *BSD. (I would like to try some, but I can't, because I'm fresh out of primary partitions.)
4) Write down a map (on paper) of how many systems you'd like, what you'll use them for, and where you want them to live, remembering that *BSD should really be in partitions 1-3, and that Windows should be installed first, in 1.

To answer your questions:

1) I don't have any experience with PartitionMagic. I did use qtparted from the Kanotix liveCD and it worked perfectly. It's free and it runs on linux, which are 2 things that PartitionMagic doesn't do. That was enough for me.
2) I don't have experience with lilo on multi-drive installations, but I've used it a lot on my little setup. I also read a lot of posts, and the majority of people to use lilo in the MBR. That's what I did, and it works perfectly.

If you are not careful and just slap linux distros wherever you have space, your drives will be a sloppy mess (like hdd is already looking) and you will waste space and paint yourself into a corner where you can't do what you wanna do. A little planning and careful fdisking will allow you to run tons of distros with plenty of room to spare. Pay attention and make sure subsequent partitions are allocated on the next even cylinder boundary.

Darwinkid, where are you on this situation now? I ask because this thread has been quiet now for almost two months. I assume you solved things OK.

In any case, I also have seen all those zeros on a black screen. Two years go, I was installing Linux and had LILO on, but then I failed the main Linux installation. I didn't know enough about Linux to know how to get rid of LILO. I needed to do that without having a working install of Linux on my machine.

I don't know whether I'd say that LILO corrupted my files, or that I corrupted my files myself. The problem resulted in bad clusters and the loss of the best ME setup I'll probably ever have. I was running both ME and XP, and trying various Linuxes. It wasn't really worth fixing up ME again, but that was such a sweet-running ME and it had taken months to make it work that well—a big loss.

I was able to reboot by using a floppy with a bootmanager on it. That worked fine. But if I recall, the lingering problem persisted until I finally did a low-level format on that hard drive. It definitely went through several XP repairs without being repaired.

It was explained to me (by a 14-year old) just what the zeros represented. It was an "overflow" of some sort. I might be able to research it more if you are still working on this one.

For interested folks who've never seen it, it is all rows and columns of 01s, covering the entire screen, and slowly scrolling down, endlessly. (It looks like a screen-saver.) All very neat and tidy, so:

01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01

. . . forever. Indeed, a pretty spectacular disaster!

Hey ya'll, check this out. pretty cool. i stumbled accross this last nite cause my windoz xp box got the "ntldr file missing" error. anywho. i decided to dump windoz altogether. so i installed slackware 10 on a 40g hd. about 3 hrs later i found that i couldn't live without playing those darn games. well i found VMware. it goes like this...
i unplugged my 40g hd containing slackware. installed my windoz on my 130g hd. once done, i plugged in my 40g slackware drive. since this is winxp, well i just told it not to mount the drive anywhere. i installed VMware in winxp and for the virtual machine hd i used the raw disk containing my slackware. since linux don't complain about not havving a boot flag set on a drive well both op sys think they are on /dev/hda1. give it a try. will make things a lot easier. although not verry cheap ($199.00).
will be nice when someone makes a free or atleast inexpensive virtual machine to do this.
(whatever ya do don't set a bootable flag on the linux drive or ya will have probs booting. i install lilo to mbr)
now if i have anymore probs with windoz i can still work in linux. just unplug win and boot.

Randux, this is not a new post, but I might mention:

—Defragging does not necessarily clean everything to one neat package at the front of the drive. There is a tendency for it to do something toward that, but there are various common reasons why some files may remain at the tail end of the drive. The belief that a cleanly defragged drive will have only free space at the tail end sometimes causes data loss, so it is good to check and see.

—I agree with your second comment. Partion Magic had its heyday before XP. XP's [Control Panel >Admin Tools >Computer Management] Disk Management is a beautiful tool, and would take the user right up to the one you recommend, so there is no need to use Partition Magic. Not for the past 6 years. But, some would argue, Disk Management doesn't adjust the size of a specific partition. True, but it does turn that into a generally undesirable strategy, because it makes everything else so very, very easy in Windows or in setting free space aside for Linux. From there, the user can return to Linux and proceed as you suggested if he really wants to resize.

IMHO. :-)

Hi
How do you add another linux installation to the booting list?

I`ve kubuntu on /dev/hda10
hda10 is mounted as /linK on Slackware 10.2. Also, the boot file for kubuntu is /linK/boot/vmlinuz 2.6...
I tried Boot Loader configuration tool on slackware, but it says "no file found /linK/boot/vmlinuz 2.6..."

The easiest thing to do is run liloconfig. That will start you all over again.

The 2nd easiest thing to do is to go to your /etc/lilo.conf file in your Slackware distro (aka "1st installation") and edit the lilo.conf file, adding the following to the end:

image=/linK/boot/vmlinuz #(or whatever you called your kernel image for KUbuntu... copy the location as you see it from slackware)
root=/dev/hda10
label=Kubuntu
read-only

Save your lilo.conf file.
** MOUNT YOUR /linK DIRECTORY!!!!
then run lilo to update the map.

Given your error, I'd say that you failed to make sure lilo could see the kubuntu boot image.

--vonSt

Thanks a lot vonst.
Kubuntu boot image did not have its permission set to executable.
I made the changes, Boot Loader configuration tool worked successfully and lilo.conf looks like shown above.

Now when the booting list comes up and Kubuntu is selected, the display goes blank and system hangs up !

Shoot, that could be anything! Did you check for cockroaches? I haven't had your problem w/ Linux. I have had it happen when I select "Windows". Why? I dunno. I'm not savvy enough.

Here's an idea, tho. Double check that /dev/hd10/boot directory. See if you can touch a test file into it. Maybe LILO isn't able to write boot.XXXX into the directory because it's locked out.

And then, if that's not it, I'm scratching my head. I don't understand OS intricacies enough.

--vonSt